AI Safety Governance and Corporate Innovation Speed

In 2019, the National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Governance Expert Committee of China was established and released Governance Principles for a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence. Developing Responsible Artificial Intelligence, which for the first time incorporated AI safety governance as a core item on the national policy agenda and marked the starting point of China's systematic advancement in this area. To examine firms' voluntary governance practices during the initial establishment and diffusion of this framework, we use Chinese A-share listed companies from 2019 to 2024 as our initial sample. Patent texts are obtained from the IPRDB Intellectual Property Database, annual reports and corporate social responsibility reports are collected from Cninfo , and official news texts and financial data are drawn from the CSMAR database.
The data are screened as follows. We exclude firms classified as Special Treatment during the sample window, financial sector firms, and observations with missing variable values. Our analysis relies on a survival model that requires further sample screening. We define spell length as the span of years since a firm's last R&D investment spike. Following Chen and Jin (2023), we exclude observations prior to each firm's first R&D investment spike. Building on this, and following Billett et al. (2011), we further remove firms meeting any of four additional criteria, namely firms with only one uncensored spell and one censored spell in which the censored spell is shorter than the uncensored spell, firms with only one R&D investment spike, firms with no R&D investment spike, and, for firms with multiple spikes, the first spell length and spike year. After this screening, the final sample comprises 1,903 firm-year observations. All continuous variables are winsorized at the 1 percent level.